John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I always love to highlight some of the more interesting emails I get from readers of my websites. This one was a passionate response to the current meaningful use audits that are happening. Excuse any grammar or spelling errors, because it wasn’t intended to be published, but I think many doctors will relate to these comments.

Apparently there is a Doctors’ “Salem witch hunt” currently going on. The government wants its money back. The poor docs have no time to question the cpa company from nyc (rude from what I understand) that has been auditing heavily and making unreasonable demands on documentations after the fact. Remember I sent you an email. “MAKING RULES AFTER THE GAME HAS BEEN PLAYED”.

How I wish you would write an article about this. They have been heavily hitting practices with reasonable size emrs and torturing them…..

I really think this is a EMR/doctor salem witch hunt.

I’m not sure I totally agree that it’s a “Salem Witch Hunt” but I guess there are some similarities. The “after the fact” documentation part is the hard one. In many ways it does feel like the auditors are auditing for something that wasn’t well defined in the first place. This seems wrong to me. A lot of people made a good faith effort to show meaningful use, and they’re getting hassled by the MU audits.

Of course, we all want some accountability for the billions of dollars that were spent on meaningful use. I just don’t think the current audit program is providing that accountability. The fact that government wasn’t even ready for the data that’s being produced by EHRs and that MU was dumb downed to self attestation is about all we need to know when it comes to their concern for accountability.

I have heard that some of the larger EHR vendors have the EHR MU audit process down to a science. When one of their customers gets an audit request, they put together a packet for the clinic which they’ve refined to meet the auditors needs including things like screenshots from the EHR application to prove the meaningful use numbers. As if a screenshot can’t be changed either. I applaud EHR vendors that assist their customers like this, but is this really what we want our EHR vendors spending their time doing?